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Sunday, December 10, 2017

Cold outside but the bands are heating up!

NZ4T - Ricky

In preparation for the upcoming QRPARCI Holiday Homebrew Sprint this afternoon, I fired up the K2 and tested the waters on HF. The bands were really pretty quiet around noon, I tossed out a few CQ's here and there and did not get any response. Spun the dial and tried out 10m through 40m, checked the band condition reports, and things did not look that promising.

So after about a half hour I locked in on 7041 Khz and started calling CQ. The band was sounding pretty quiet and pretty empty so to my surprise I heard Ricky NZ4T booming in to the Hoosier state from Covington Virginia. He was 599 here and he gave me a 579 on my 10w K2 effort. Ricky was using a old J-38 and his Yaesu FT 920 with a windom up in his trees to work a little CW today. Ricky has an excellent fist, and was very patient with my sloppy sending today, my fingers on my right hand go numb from time to time due a pinched nerve...it never fails. Anyway, we had a very nice QSO lasting right at a half an hour. We found out that neither of us are big fans of winter weather, and we both use CW as our primary means of amateur radio communications. Ricky is also SKCC 12246, so we exchanged SKCC numbers and signed. Ricky has also earned the almost world famous KB9BVN Ragchewer Award!

Anyway, I hope to hear a few of you during the Holiday Homebrew Sprint today. Remember it starts at 3PM EST and ends at 7PM EST. Go to the QRP-ARCI website for all the rules and online logging.